WordPress Accessibility Day 2024 Archive

Accessible Firebrand: “Why can’t I use my brand color there, and if not there, then where?”

Beginner

October 9, 2024 at 20:00 UTC

Session Video

Space for positioning sign language player

Every company is strongly invested in their brand colors, even when these don’t meet contrast ratio requirements against their site’s background color. From an accessibility specialist’s perspective, it’s essential to know where these colors cannot be used, but from a designer’s practical and aesthetic perspective, it’s important to know where and how they can safely be used to build brand identity.

In this session you’ll learn how and why companies are often inclined to use their brand colors in inaccessible ways. Together we’ll examine real-world uses of brand colors in places that are clear and not-so-clear violations of the WCAG and other accessibility principles. We’ll discuss ways to demonstrate the problem to the company decision makers, including tools that can help illustrate the problem. We’ll suggest arguments to use to persuade decision-makers to change their tactics. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll go over how companies can engagingly use their brand colors on their site in ways that don’t violate accessibility principles. This will make it so that decision makers don’t balk as much at abandoning their inaccessible uses.

Speakers

Mark Alvis, a man with brown hair and a beard wearing a blue shirt. There are rocks and mountains in the background.
Brand + UI Designer, Seamonster Studios
Deneb Pulsipher, a brown-haired, brown eyed man with sideburns smiling at the camera
Captain Accessible, SeaMonster Studios